1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an endoscope system capable of detecting a convex portion in a body cavity.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been widely used a medical endoscope that inserts an elongated insertion section into a curved body cavity to thereby observe organs and the like in deep parts in the body cavity without dissecting a body surface and realizes various kinds of therapy, treatment, and the like using a treatment instrument inserted through a treatment instrument channel of an endoscope insertion section according to necessity.
There has been also performed laparoscopy for enabling, using a laparoscope as an endoscope, therapy and treatment while observing a treatment instrument and a treatment region without performing abdominal operation. The laparoscopy has an advantage that invasion into a patient is alleviated. However, in the laparoscopy, it is hard to check a very small convex lesion part in a body cavity.
For example, a peritoneum lesion of endometriosis has a very small and transparent blister-like convex shape. A generation region of the peritoneum lesion extends to a side range such as an abdominal wall, organs in an abdominal cavity, a surface layer of a human body, and the like. Therefore, the peritoneum lesion is easily overlooked in the laparoscopy.
As an apparatus that detects such a lesion part, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2010-82271 (hereinafter referred to as Literature 1) proposes an apparatus that detects very small unevenness in a body cavity. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2009-273655 (hereinafter referred to as Literature 2) proposes an image processing system that specifies a shape of an object surface.
Incidentally, in such an apparatus that detects a convex portion, which is a lesion part, a size of a convex portion of a lesion part desired to be detected is often limited to a predetermined size range. For example, a convex portion having a size too small as a lesion part does not need to be detected. A convex portion having a size that can be surely checked by the laparoscopy or the like does not particularly need to be detected either. For example, a convex portion having a size larger than a predetermined maximum size (e.g., 5 mm) and a convex portion having a size smaller than a predetermined minimum size (e.g., 1 mm) sometimes do not need to be detected.